Policing Politics: Dealing with the Past an Ongoing PSNI Train Wreck

The recent tribulations surrounding the PSNI’s attempts to gain access to Winston Rea’s Belfast Project tapes are yet another dismal but unsurprising instalment in this episodic train wreck.

As noted by Ed Moloney, it reeks of counter-balancing, a politically-motivated attempt at even-handedness after the previous arrests of Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, and other republicans.

This entire debacle, brought about by Boston College’s bogus guarantees and failure to protect the project, highlights the patchwork, expedient nature of the Belfast Agreement, which has left a legacy of ad hoc, unfocused, and at times contradictory attempts to deal with the past and the issue of historical offences.

Is this pursuit of the BC tapes in keeping with the spirit of early release, OTR amnesties, paramilitants in government, and the like? With the first prime minister in possibly 50 years with no apparent interest in Northern Ireland, is Downing St even aware of the damage this is causing?

After the undignified arrest of a decrepit and visibly infirm Ivor Bell, the PSNI have now zeroed in on Rea, another pensioner in ill health.

The irony is that the Red Hand Commando, the organisation he is accused of leading, is to date – and I’m willing to be corrected – the only paramilitary group which has completely disbanded.

The only remnant of its existence is an “Old Comrades” association. What sort of message does this send out at a time when the UVF and UDA are trying to persuade loyalists to engage with conflict transformation initiatives?

It is no exaggeration to say that the PSNI’s Belfast Project vendetta represents an attack on source confidentiality, a cornerstone of journalistic, academic, and historical research.

Indeed, if we are now operating on the principle that there is no such thing as academic or journalistic confidentiality, why not raid the offices of, say, the Sunday World? Wouldn’t their informants, plied with drink and cash-stuffed envelopes, be a more appropriate target, given that they would have information on current rather than historical offences?

In fact, why not pull in every author who has published a book on the Troubles and compel them to reveal their sources? As low down in the food chain as I am, even I have noticed a degree of reluctance amongst sources and potential interviewees who have cited the BC affair as the source of their concerns.

The latest counter-balancing exercise obscures the fact that an even-handed approach to investigating the crimes of the Troubles is a political chimera.

The unique relationship between the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein, with dual membership and army-to-party transitions commonplace, means that any wide-ranging investigation into the “army” will at some point inevitably stumble across figures who are presently prominent or senior within the “party”, specifically Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland.

The ramifications of such an occurrence are easy to imagine. As such, political necessity will likely dictate that police attention continues to focus upon both loyalists and republican dissenters.

When the stakes potentially involve Sinn Fein’s continuing participation in power-sharing, “in the public interest” becomes an elastic and expansive term.

SITE MAP

The value of the Oral Tradition is its democracy; it doesn't give to an intellectual elite the exclusive right to shape a communal memory and the collective memory. It makes into a common wealth the story of our shared lives. It's something that we share in common – and it's like a collection plate into which we can all put something: our stories, our myths and the ease with which we are able to, in some way, cross boundaries. - Cleophus Thomas, Jr.

First Circuit Court of Appeals

May, 2013

“… we must forcefully conclude that preserving the judicial power to supervise the enforcement of subpoenas in the context of the present case, guarantees the preservation of a balance of powers… In substance, we rule that the enforcement of subpoenas is an inherent judicial function which, by virtue of the doctrine of separation of powers, cannot be constitutionally divested from the courts of the United States. Nothing in the text of the US-UK MLAT, or its legislative history, has been cited by the government to lead us to conclude that the courts of the United States have been divested of an inherent judicial role that is basic to our function as judges.”

“… the district court acted within its discretion in ordering their production, it abused its discretion in ordering the production of a significant number of interviews that only contain information that is in fact irrelevant to the subject matter of the subpoena.”

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